Bob Dylan and Sam Hunt

Yesterday Bob Dylan turned the dubious age the Bible warns us of seventy. Much of Dylan's life and best work has been under a black cloud...I'm sure being 70 doesn't bother him too much. I have an appropriate BLACK book at home called "Bob Dylan Lyrics 1962 - 1985". It is the collection of his songs laid out as poems which paint pictures of people and places! Bob might score me 2/10 for alliteration...he's much better at it than me.

Also this week our famous New Zealand poet of about that age, Sam Hunt, has had a film released about him called "Purple Balloons and Other Stories". If you know Sam Hunt, you will know quite often his poems don't rhyme and they are delivered in a kind of monotonous tone a bit like Bob! But that's what makes them unique and well loved. I have 2 fond memories of Sam. The first when he came to our school in 1982 of him standing to attention outside the school library saluting one of the boys who came to school on mufti day a bit different to everyone else in full army uniform. The second memory is of Sam sitting in a chair at Waitangi, drink in hand, chuckling to himself as he observed Prince Charles arriving in a Maori canoe on to land and walking past the crowds on his way to the marae for the annual celebrations. I'm not exactly sure but I think he was enjoying the irony of the moment. If you know New Zealand history, and the problems caused by the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, you might get it.

Bob and Sam both have their own unique way of delivering their poems. Most modern poetry is in musical form so we are not really accustomed to people reading poetry as popular art. But at times in history, poets have been very famous - Yeats, Shelley, Blake, Plath...it's a long list including David and Solomon from the Bible. Poems are big ideas in small rhyming phrases - a way of telling stories in a concise and memorable way. Sam Hunt reckons he can remember 4000 poems by heart, he said it's because they are so good that he cannot forget them!

When Sam was asked why he preferred to perform poetry rather than write it he said "The day the printing press was invented poems were well and truly hammered down on the page and quickly taken over by the academics. A lot of people still think a poem on a page is the poem but it's not - that's the score of the poem. If somebody handed me a sheet of music I'd say 'Well, can you play it or get some musicians to play it? Then I could hear it'. I feel the same with poems. The poets I really love and would die for, all their poems work out there when you say them."

The Bible is exactly as Sam describes. It is just words on paper but like music and poetry, it only comes to life when it is performed.